A Look at Piotr Szyhalski’s Daily COVID-19 Reports

 

 

Apr 27, 2020

Walker Publishing Filed to Sightlines

Lettering by Piotr Szyhalski (left); detail of COVID-19 : Labor Camp Report : April 20, 2020 (right). All images courtesy the artist.

On March 23, Donald Trump announced that “America will, again, and soon, be open for business,” famously adding that when it comes to the global coronavirus pandemic, “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.” Statistics from Johns Hopkins University gave healthcare professionals reason to object: at that point, the US was nearing 43,000 coronavirus cases and 600 deaths—tolls that have surpassed 973,000 cases and 50,000 deaths today, nearly five weeks later. On March 24, Minneapolis-based artist Piotr Szyhalski grabbed a brush and some ink and started a drawing.

“I was, like us all, disoriented and disturbed and upset and afraid,” he recalls. “I had to do something to keep my mind off things.” An image came to mind—a severed head, seedlings sprouting from its eye sockets—and he drew, not quite knowing why. “I just wanted to draw it, and the idea of the economic implications of [COVID-19] was on my mind the whole time.” As with many of his works, Szyhalski hand-lettered text, adding a phrase that felt related: “Long live our banks!” He asked his daughter, Ava, to hold the drawing up, snapped an iPhone photo, and posted it on Instagram and Facebook, along with explanatory text: “Pondering the notion casually floated by our ‘leadership’ that some will need to die in order to save the ‘economy.’” He struck a nerve: his posts racked up hundreds of likes and comments and sparked DMs from around the country and the world, asking for more.

The next day, just as Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was issuing a shelter-in-place order that continues today, he started another piece, setting in motion a daily practice of artmaking in response to the politics and pain surrounding COVID-19. This second “Labor Camp Report,” named after the artistic framework Szyhalski has been making art under for years, is even darker: the hand of a man wearing a suit is seen eviscerating what appears to be a body, entrails marked with dollar signs spilling onto the ground. “Open it up! For business,” it reads, an ebullient exclamation mark contrasting the gruesome scene.

Each of the pieces in the series—now 35 works and growing—taps into, and tweaks, the familiar. One has a travel poster vibe, but a closer look reveals a more mixed message: an idyllic scene of a cozy cabin high on a plateau, smoke puffing from its chimney, reveals a sidewalk that abruptly ends at a cliff. Companion text enthusiastically implores, “Stay Home!” Another riffs on the famous British "Keep Calm and Carry On” poster from World War II, replacing the queen’s crown with one from the Corona beer label, adding a skull and crossbones along with text, echoing the typeface used in a 1932 Hitler campaign poster, that spells out “TOTAL AUTHORITY.” Another offers the cheery phrase, “Congratulations! Job well done.” At its center, two hands shake, their dollar-sign cufflinks visible. On the artwork’s top margin, and the rationale for this sardonic praise, the number of global coronavirus cases and deaths on that day, April 9: 426,180 and 16,444.

The series taps into Szyhalski’s professional and personal interests in the role art can play in social movements. Born in Poland in 1967, he grew up steeped in the visual vocabularies of control and resistance. He came of age in an era of general strikes and political upheaval, witnessing the rise (and eventual fall) of the Solidarity movement and the crumbling of communism. As a child he recalls receiving a copy of the book Front Line Poster, which catalogued stencil art printed by soldiers literally in the trenches of war. “I was always mesmerized, both by the aesthetic of these images but also by the notion of imagining these soldiers with their weapons alongside the guys printing these posters, basically sharing the same space and operating in two different ways,” he recalls. “So maybe there’s a naïve, romantic notion of art being able to function on the same level, right? Like having this lethal quality about it.” In those same years, shortly before moving to the United States in 1990, he began studying poster design and drawing. His schooling was entirely manual, he recalls—no computers—and to pass exams he had to render perfect Roman letterforms by hand, using only a straight-edge and compass.

In the States, he explored other influences—performance, music, large-scale events, digital technology, and public practice—forming a far-reaching, interdisciplinary practice. He created works ranging from Ding an Sich (The Canon Series), an interactive net-art piece commissioned by the Walker in 1997, to environments involving salt, pine caskets, video projections, and the tools of labor (as seen in his 2015 show Three Factory Pieces at Minneapolis’s now-defunct Soap Factory) to a “public-access letterpress printer,” in which he created giant letterforms to transfer the words of community members onto massive banners for use in protests from the Justice for Jamar demonstrations in North Minneapolis to the #NoDAPL encampment at Standing Rock. But when the coronavirus pandemic struck, he found himself confined at home and, as a result, returning to the hands-on practice of drawing that marked his early development as an artist—and to the familiar language of propaganda.

It’s a word Szyhalski despises—almost as much as he dislikes the term “political art,” especially when it’s applied to his work. “I just hate it with a passion,” he says. “And, propaganda is almost synonymous with it, but with a little more vulgarity attached.” As a professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), he says he’d advise students: “Use the language of art but not in the black-and-white, propagandistic way of thinking; rather, activate the gray spaces and think about nuance and complexity.”

When asked recently, as he often is, about making political art, he came up with a reply that pleased him. “I concern myself with politics in the way other artists might concern themselves with the landscape,” he said. “Politics is the thing that I’m looking at, and I’m responding to it as an artist in whatever language seems appropriate.”

Then came COVID-19.

“The world has changed in ways that we could not have conceived,” he says. “Literally the whole world is experiencing this one thing, and it’s rife with criminality. Being in this moment awakened in me the need to skip the nuance and just go straight for the fucking jugular. I gave myself permission to do it.” He says that because he hasn’t drawn—or thought—like this in decades, “I feel like I can sustain this basically indefinitely because it’s been pent up for such a long time. It’s no holds barred.”

Asked if what he’s creating now is propaganda, he answers sheepishly, "Well, damn it, I want to say that it isn't."

Diane Mullin, senior curator at the Weisman Art Museum, applauds the series for being true to Szyhalski’s artistic roots, suggesting that it doesn't cross a line into propaganda. "Honoring the handmade, utilizing technology, commenting without proselytizing, and consistently and ceaselessly challenging his audiences," she says, "Szyhalski has once again recast our experience in real time as a call to attention, prompting us to draw our own inferences and take informed action." (Mullin is the curator of the Piotr Szyhalski: We Are Working All The Time!, the first expansive look at the artist’s thirty-year career, slated to open at the Weisman on October 10, 2020.)

While this urgency lends the work much of its power, so does the universality of the issues he’s addressing. Just as he’s painstakingly drawing each letter by hand, Szyhalski is equally precise in selecting imagery to include in each work. Befitting a pandemic—a term that combines the Greek words for “all” and “people”—he’s sure to stay global in his approach. He never mentions any party, politician, or entity by name, whether Trump or Xi, price-gouging retailers or manufacturers of faulty facemasks. And, for the most part, he reports either the national or global statistics for infection rates and deaths, not local ones. (One particularly visceral exception was April 7’s “Wisconsin Edition.” He listed the count of infections and deaths in that state, along with a depiction of a voter’s hand sliced clean off by a kitchen knife as it deposited a ballot into a voting box—a clear commentary on a ruling from the US Supreme Court that blocked the governor’s efforts to postpone the state’s primary election over the risk of coronavirus infection posed by in-person voting).

And his imagery follows this logic: he uses easily recognized symbols (men in business suits, smartphones, snakes, knives, dollar signs) and the same recurring man, whose grotesque face conjures a character from a Leon Golub painting moreso than the American president. His March 30 drawing features a flag with a dollar sign on it and a single word: “Plague.” “That taps directly into the language of all the nationalistic posters with flags in every country in the world. You’ve seen these things a billion times, right?”

Just over a month into the project Szyhalski shows no signs of slowing. That’s due in part to his sense of mission, it seems. “I really believe that as artists, we need to be doing this,” he says. “If there is a responsibility, the responsibility is to be there, to witness, and to respond and to reflect what we are experiencing, and unfortunately what we are experiencing has a shitload of hurt.”

But he acknowledges that while his ideas and energy won’t soon dry up, daily Labor Camp Reports may come to an end before the coronavirus pandemic does. When he began the series in late March, he used tools on hand: seven sheets of leftover paper and a half bottle of ink. During an online meeting with artist Mike Hoyt, creative community liaison at Minneapolis’s Pillsbury House, he offhandedly mentioned that he was running low. Hoyt halted the meeting to text his coworker, artist Masanari Kawahara, who teaches art classes for kids at Pillsbury. “Masa took a large bottle of ink and put it in their Little Free Library outside," Szyhalski says. "So I just drove up and picked it up like some kind of clandestine operation.” The project continued.

For now. Befitting an age of toilet paper stockpiling and scarce coronavirus test kits, he concedes, “Maybe the end is literally when I run out of materials.”

Szyhalski has agreed to share his COVID-19 project with Walker Reader as it progresses. Below, an archive of the full series, updated daily and annotated with Szyhalski’s comments, in reverse chronological order. To view on Instagram, visit @laborcamp.

NOVEMBER 2020

OCTOBER 2020

SEPTEMBER 2020

AUGUST 2020

JULY 2020

JUNE 2020

MAY 2020

APRIL 2020

MARCH 2020